We have been making rather a lot of window thingies. Well, technically, I have been folding things like a mad creature, while Hero menaces tissue paper and glue. They are quite addictive, though, these things – I so love looking at the colours with the sun coming through the window, and anything which reminds me to look outside, that the world will not always be covered either in rain or in mud, can only be a good thing. (I shouldn’t say this, really, given that the last three days have brought bright winter sunshine and crackling starry nights.)

Hero has a new coat, and pink and purple boots made for her by the very lovely shoemaker in Exeter. Her choice of colours, which was nice. The buckles are a complete sod, it must be said, but ultimately they are lovely boots, and how many people get to choose not only the colours but the style of their shoes, from a virtually limitless list of suggestions? If you can’t do it when you’re three and a half, then when?

Our newest familiar, Hecate, is settling in well. Wixon is, shall we say, quite taken with her.

The aforementioned winter sunshine. Good, isn’t it?

Both the heart-shaped casserole (full of rice pudding, a rather unlikely favourite of mine of late; sadly I am alone in this as neither Hero nor Quercus can be persuaded of its divinity) and the cow coffee pot visible in the background are things which make my heart sing whenever I spot them.

My ridiculous magpie-like love of shiny colourful things took over when I saw this sling (a Girasol Earthy Rainbow, if you’re interested) for a very good price indeed. We have bought next to nothing new for Mirth; it seemed nice that she should have a sling to herself, given how much use it’s going to get!

Our bedroom, post-transformation. Look! A ceiling! Which stays up and everything! Not particularly neat at the moment and covered in baby-related paraphernalia, but the room is blissful, and I am quite in love with the increasing quantities of wood which are becoming visible in our house. (Not least as their presence means the roof is not about to join us for afternoon tea.)

Mirth, aptly named both here and in real life, sporting a rather fetching bib and velvety suit passed on to us by some very lovely friends.

Mirth investigating this whole sitting malarky. Note also Pink Mousey, who looks like Sniff of Moomin fame, and who was sent to us by the lovely L-Q-S.

Mad hair and mad exploits with a new puzzle house and a plethora of animals. Hero’s ‘farm’ now includes – but is not limited to – a camel, a fox, a wolf and a wild boar. She is quite the connoiseur.

Such a smiley baby, it is just not true. Also, note plumptious legs – this babe is already nearly 20 lb! That explains all those night-feeds, then…

Star lights on shelves of jars with various bits and bobs. Including plastic reindeer. As you do.

It’s February already, somehow. Mirth will be six months old on the tenth of the month, and, in between sanding and waxing a Stokke highchair bought for £20 at an advent fair, I am wondering how on earth she can on the verge of joining us for dinner, yet her careful attentive watching as she sits on one or other of us while we eat assures me that she is, as does her poise when sitting and her reaching hands as she sees glasses and cutlery move. January has been a difficult month – one of those where everything goes wrong – and we are still finding our feet in its wake, but Mirth and Hero provide me with daily joy, genuine glee, at having two such bright souls in my life. (Yes, even at 3 a.m.) So, I am reminding myself of the happy things as I reach for the strength, the persistence, to sort out all the irritations, the challenges, the oh-you-just-bloody-well-would-wouldn’t-yous. (Current tally: frozen pipes = no washing machine or dishwasher and only sporadic sink water; new washing machine as last one gave up; car breaking down intermittently since Christmas Eve because of a veg oil conversion; my car’s brakes decided to stop working properly due to Comedy French Wiring (a well-known term on sad-git car forums); sleep, the lack thereof; money, the lack thereof; hard-drive dependability, the lack thereof.)

And in less than two weeks, we begin the next phase of work on our house, and Mirth, Hero and I will be heading to West Sussex for a few weeks (anyone local, do say hello!), to stay with Quercus’s mother while Quercus takes ceilings and plaster down. As part of this, we are meeting a central heating engineer later on today; I am quite excited (though I’d be so more fully if I had worked out an infallible bank-robbery strategy first, given that we are probably looking at about six thousand pounds to do the sort of thing we need to do). Our pipes are frozen for the fourth year running today; we had a heating plan and a plumbing plan designed for us by ex-friend David, and basically the latter sucks and the former never materialised. So, we’re finally taking the bull by the proverbial and seeing if we can at least fix the heating problem. At the moment, we have a woodstove in the living room, and that’s it. What we’re hoping for is a larger stove (12kw or so) with a back boiler, and thus a radiator in the kitchen, a towel rail in the bathroom, and radiators in each of the bedrooms. Of course, our house being difficult and minute, it is a tricky job and the heights and levels are all wrong. But it would be so, so good to get this sorted once and for all – I would not miss the lakes which appear on our windowsills each morning, and nor would I miss the mould which forms when things get damp, and nor would I miss the searing heat we achieve in the living room combined with the chilling see-your-breath cold of the bedrooms.

Still to come: the saga of the Steinway piano sale (or not), the rice pudden recipe to end all rice puddens, and the fact that I appear to be sliding towards vegan cooking.

So, that’s where I am at the moment. Where are you, internets?

Ho hum.

This weekend, Quercus has been trying to get back into the swing of working on our house. The current project is to get the garden work finished (as much as is seasonally possible) by the end of February; we have a block of time set aside for just this very thing, beginning on Friday, and Quercus’s mother is coming to lend an extra pair of hands, which is probably just as well given that this weekend saw me with the first twinges of a back pain suggestive of SPD.* So, Saturday was spent with the small girl and I pottering about the house, sorting out laundry (thrills! deep joy!) and house stuff, and pootling on the patio for tea-breaks with Quercus, who was otherwise engaged in making shelving for the workshop so we can get our tools and general shed paraphernalia sorted out, prior to doing more intensive work as the year goes on.

We’ve had a few weeks of not doing very much around the house, somehow. There are lots of things to do, of course, but somehow, the slump around Christmas just took a while to wear off… so that despite his having worked really hard for a week in early January, we still find ourselves with a list which includes many tasks identified quite a while ago. I think the thing is that it’s difficult to sustain a really brisk pace over a long period of time, particularly when you’re also working, living in a house which requires a lot of just ordinary cleaning and maintenance even to tread water domestically, and bringing up small children on top of that. So, from time to time we just sort of collapse into a small heap of lethargy. Well, I do, at least, and I’m not even the one doing the majority of it. (I like to think of myself as er, ahem, a facilitator.)

But as the weather improves – and we did get some sunshine on Saturday, albeit followed by gale-force winds and pissing rain – and the days lengthen, we remember that somehow, I am fifteen weeks into pregnancy, and before we know it, this whole managing-a-house-with-one-child-plus-jobs-and-renovation malarky will seem like child’s play as newborn chaos reigns and we find ourselves back on rations of sleep which are expressed in minutes with perfect validity. So, the things we’re going to do by the end of this month include:

•  laying the stepping-stone paths (we’re now thinking about using meaty cordwood rounds instead of paving slabs, simply because we can’t seem to find something we like and can afford, despite months and months of hunting) down to the bottom of the garden;

• finishing off the workshop and bringing the contents back from storage;

• rotovating what will be the lawn, which is the largest of our three terraces;

•  grass-seeding;

•  sticking in decent quantities of manure and topsoil where the new growing beds are going to be;

•  planting a few things!

•  clearing out the greenhouse;

•  sorting a waterbutt or two for the workshop;

• plugging gaps in the hedge where necessary.

This, of course, is only half the story – the other side of our garden, which is about the same size as this piece, is completely broken. It’s covered in a combination of a goodly-sized woodpile (which will one day be housed in the barn which Quercus will build for wood storage, but probably not until next year), building supplies and general crud, but we’re thinking sufficient unto the day and all that, so for this spring, it’s the kitchen garden, effectively, which we’re hoping to finish, so that we can then try to work out a way of sorting two of the four rooms in the original house. (For ‘sorting’, read ‘taking down the ceilings; stripping the walls of their crumbling plaster; working out minor details like woodwork, doorframes, cupboards, shelving; reinstating plaster, skirting boards, ceilings and so on’.)

It’s quite daunting, truth be told, and I’m struggling with the feeling of being unable to help beyond the facilitating bit. This is a bit of a recurring problem for me; I like to be in control (‘what? you!? Nooooooo.’) and not being able to be in control does not bring out the best in me. I like to make lists, and to tick things off, and to move swiftly on, and whatnot. And I just can’t, really, when it’s not me who’s doing the things on the list. And it’s not fair of me to want things to move more quickly, and I know that, and I know it’s not helping to chivvy, but oh. It is not easy to park a lifetime of twitchy must-try-harder mental habits.

So, I am hoping that Quercus and I can write a list together, so that I know what’s likely to happen when, and so that I don’t get unrealistic expectations of what might be possible. I can do things to help, of course, like making sure there is cake for a break with tea, and food for dinner which doesn’t take much thought, and enough to drink, and clean working clothes. I can ensure the small girl is happily occupied, and I can make sure that I’m eating well and taking care of myself so that I don’t enter that horribly emotional state which for me often goes with tiredness in pregnancy, meaning that Quercus can Just Get On With It without having to worry about how I’m doing, and whether I’m about to sprout snakes instead of hair. But I so so so wish that we just had pots of money, so that we could get someone to help us do this, so that we could wave a bit of a magic wand and just make some of the list go away, preferably with time enough to spare that the last months of this pregnancy might not be such a balancing act, such a divide-and-conquer approach to our time as the two adults in the house. When you’ve got limited funds, where is that point that decides you on prioritising just getting things done over keeping the small quantities of savings that you’ve accrued…? And did I mention that Quercus may be made redundant at some point in the coming months, as part of UK government cuts to the civil service? Let us not speak of that, actually – we knew that this was a possibility, and I’m hopeful that with careful management, we’ll do just fine. I prefer to be positive about these things, after all.

Friends have been talking to me since I said that I’m pregnant, telling me of the importance of networks, and of local friends upon whom one can rely for emergency childcare, cups of tea, bolt-holes. I do know this, of course, but it’s hard to cultivate these networks when you’re generally always occupied doing something, be it commuting from work or freelance editing or spending time with the small girl or debating paving slabs and heating solutions. I am trying, though, and I’m trying to find out about things like pre-school, and whether or not it is right for us, and other groups to occupy small people, and ways to manage my time which make household-running easier.

Sometimes I’d like to just be pregnant, you know? But then, does that ever happen, I wonder? Or is it just that most people seem to have children at a time in their lives when change is inevitable? Moving house, changing jobs, having other children to think about…?

So. There you go. And you? What are you up to on this (hopefully) sunny Monday morning?

* SPD – to those happy uninitiated readers, this is basically where the ol’ pregnancy hormones get a bit carried away, and your pelvis loosens, meaning that the joints aren’t terribly comfortable. Sometimes this means audible clicking, sometimes ‘just’ aches and pains. Sometimes it means hydrotherapy helps, and sometimes it means crutches. In my last pregnancy I had SPD from about 22 weeks, so it’s not particularly surprising that it may be thinking about starting a bit earlier this time. Tell you what, though: it can fuck right off.

We also managed a walk by the sea in the closing light of the afternoon; it was surprisingly calm, and the sun was just glorious, despite brief showers. It is extremely civilised living within a half-hour of lots of Jurassic coastline.

(Lengthy aside: the only slight fly in the ointment was that I appear to have picked up some evil chest infection thing. I didn’t really write much about this at the time, but last winter was officially not fun in terms of being ill. I think because we were getting so little consistent sleep (the small girl often waking several times a night, very rarely sleeping an entire night through and waking earlier than seemed strictly civilised), coupled with having rather a lot to do (work, house renovation, freelance stuff, childcare, the need to appear to be a functioning adult etc), my immune system just buggered off and left me to it, saying something along the lines of ‘well if you’re not going to have a holiday, I certainly am!’.

Result: 42 days of sick leave in one year.

Yes.

That’s FORTY-TWO DAYS. About a month of that was the point where my GP said ‘you need a break; here is a certificate for three weeks – kindly get some sleep and try to get yourself sorted as you have had TOO MANY ANTI-BIOTICS TO BE ENTIRELY SANE’. Obviously, it’s fair to say that the people I work with were not exactly delighted by this absence, and I felt utterly rubbish about it, not least because the whole time I was off, I felt terrible. Hacking cough, tentative adult-onset asthma diagnosis because of SO. MANY. INFECTIONS. The whole nine yards, and all that. Then, in the summer, the small girl seemed to hit her stride, and her sleep has been much, much more consistent since about May, overlooking teething and the odd glitch. As a result: one day off sick since then. Now, however, I’m worried that perhaps that diagnosis of asthma wasn’t as wide of the mark as I’d hoped; I thought that I just kept catching things, and they were ending up as chest infections because of those postcards from Rio that my immune system used to remind me of its existence. I picked up a cold last weekend, thought I’d cleared it, yet here I am, wheezy and tight-chested with a cough which sounds like that of a heavy smoker. I wish I could just crawl back into bed and stay there until Wednesday, but the thing is, I really, really don’t want to take more time off work. I’m into a new year now, as it were, and I don’t want to blot my copy-book so early in the winter. So, my plan is just to hope that it’ll bugger off shortly, leaving me fine and not wheezy and distinctly un-asthmatic. In the meantime, I’ve asked for an inhaler prescription. Woe. Woe is me. Anyone with tips for easing a wheezing chest (rhymes! see? recipes, pictures, AND RHYMES! Don’t say I never give you anything), please share.

Ahem.

Back to the birthday.

Quince pie. QUINCE PIE. In fact, QUINCE PIE!

Like this:

Runcible Pie

Take…

Filling:
3 large cooking apples;
2 quinces;
a very goodly sprinkling of sugar (for which read: half a truckload);

Pie itself:
about a pound of shortcrust pastry, i.e.
12 oz (in this case) self-raising flour (yes, I had run out of plain, and yes, I was determined anyway);
5 oz margarine/butter;
4 oz icing sugar;
enough cold water to form into a decent wodge of pastry.

Then…
First, bugger about assembling pastry while remembering fondly the days when your mother had A Mixer Which Did All This For You. Congratulate self on green nature of doing it by hand, and swig more sloe to ease cramp in hand. (That’s my excuse, anyway, and I am sticking to it.) Pastry sorted, stick in fridge to cool. Retrieve it after about twenty minutes (or, er, rather longer, if you completely forget about it while gorging yourself on quince pulp), and line an eight-inch greased pie dish with it, leaving about a third aside for the pie lid. I then blind-baked the case, as we had the oven on for dinner anyway, for about twenty minutes at 180°c.

Then peel, core and chop the apples and quinces, and pop them in a pan with about an inch of boiling water. I was amazed at the speed with which quinces discolour; two minutes after peeling, they were already very brown, so putting them in water as you go is probably the way forward. Cook them gently, lid on, for about twenty minutes, until the apple is completely pulpified and even the quince is looking a little mollified. Poke suspiciously at the quince, removing a small section with an inappropriately cumbersome utensil. Ingest said morsel, and come to terms with the need for SUGAR! yes, SUGAR! immediately. Turn head right way round and drink gallon of sloe wine to recover from after-effects of sourness. Bung in about eight tablespoons of sugar, stir until dissolved, and test, gingerly, sourness levels. Decide acceptable, and have at the lot with a masher, as the quinces don’t break down as much as the apple.

Pour the resulting gloop into the pie case, and whack on your rolled-out lid. Whole lot then goes in the oven for about another twenty-five minutes at 180°c.

THE QUINCES. I cannot stress the loveliness of the quinces.

Slaver, slaver.

Still to come: that vegan gingeriness, apple, grape and sage jelly, quince cheese and apple butter recipes, together with elderberry delight and quince cordials. Recipes, that is. (I will get those sodding 52 Recipes in 2010 done, dagnammit.)

And you? What has the weekend held for you?

1 c bicarbonate of soda;
2 c cornflour;
1c water;
essential oils to scent if you fancy it.

It has a pleasantly porcelain-like effect, courtesy of the cornflour; the ‘clay’ is very white, and slightly sparkly because of the bicarb, and it’s very smooth to roll out. Somehow that pristine whiteness is rather appealing, and it’s tough enough to withstand toddler poking without just falling apart.

We used cedarwood atlas oil to make it smell nice, and we had a good old bash at it with the rolling pins that La Que Sabe bought for the small girl, together with some Ikea cookie cutters.

After baking them (using up the heat after cooking dinner; took a couple of goes this way, but I didn’t fancy turning on the oven specifically to cook these little blighters, and hey, patience is a virtue [which I do not possess], OK?), we then had at them with some watercolour paints. You can see the basic white colour in the picture there, on the right; I almost wish now that I’d kept some of them white, because they do look rather pretty in a sort of pared-down way. Of course, pared-down is not, perhaps the most obvious watch-word for my, er, style, if you can call it that. Ahem. (That probably explains the explosion-in-firework-factory end result.)

Turns out that the little blocks of watercolour work very well for this sort of thing, though I’d thought they wouldn’t give a dense enough colour. Certainly, some of the ones that the small girl did on her own were quite wash-like, colour-wise, but variety is the spice of life, right? Plus, I have been genuinely alarmed previously by sessions involving tubes of paint – the paint! it goes so fast! you can virtually hear the coins chinking! This is how they turned out:

As they’re still only flour, really, and water, I think we’ll probably dip them in some sort of varnish or hard oil soon, to try to keep them for as long as possible, though I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how hardy they are, at least for now – we dropped several during the painting session, on to our slate kitchen floor, and not a one broke, despite being (I would have thought) a reasonably fragile shape.

We’ve made up some saltdough since then; the resulting stars are drying out as I speak. The dough is a creamy colour with small flecks in (courtesy of having used up part of a rather damp bag of wholewheat flour), and I’ve added lemon juice and sunflower oil to make it (apparently) more malleable when being worked and harder when dry. The basic recipe I used was this:

2 c plain flour;
1 c salt;
1 c water;
1 tbsp oil;
a good squeeze of lemon juice.

Again, the stars are getting a quick cooking here and there after dinner, and other than that, I’m leaving them to dry out by the woodburner. (Talking of which, we had our second frost of the year last night – everything was glittering with a dusting of powdery ice this morning, and very pretty it was too.) I think we’ll probably try the watercolours again afterwards, though I have also got some acrylic gold paint, which I wondered about just rubbing on by hand around the edges or somesuch arty-farty nonsense.

In other news, it’s Quercus’s birthday on Saturday. (‘Daddy’s burfday! Candles! Cake! Sing ‘happy buuuuuuurfday!’) Predictably, I have left sorting out his presents until the eleventh-and-a-halfth hour, partly because I am horribly disorganised of late, and partly because he hasn’t been going to his sodding rehearsals (he plays in two local orchestras, which should – note should – mean he’s out for two evenings a week, leaving me free reign of craftiness galore, but they’ve had a lot of sectional sessions, and as he plays a stupid instrument brass instrument which isn’t always needed, that’s meant a lot of missed crafty time, dagnammit).  This means that the last week or so has found me beggaring about in a feverish frenzy of I-can’t-say-because-he-reads-this-blog, and tonight, when he departs – finally! – for a rehearsal, will be no exception. Let us just say that there may be baking involved. Recipes and whatnot to follow shortly.

And in still other news, I am rather excited to be doing a parcel swap of goodies with the lovely Nadine, who lives in Prague and thus, it seems, has access to all sorts of striped delights of a tightly-sock nature. I really love finding out about people who come here and read the blathering idiocy that I inflict on the webly waves; it tickles me all sorts of puce to learn that someone reads this blog while eating breakfast as I am going to bed at night (hello, Nettles!), or that they too are interested in a cob hot tub run off wood (hello Canadian person whose name escapes me but which may have been – nope – sorry – it’s gone; please remind me if you’re still out there).

So. In the manner of the Spanish inquisition, who are you, where are you reading from, and what pearls of wisdom, crafty* or otherwise, have you to share on this bright frosty morning (here)? And would anyone else fancy doing a small parcel swap, goodies from deepest darkest Devon to… well, anywhere, really? I do love sending and receiving things in the post. There is something about unwrapping actual, physical parcels which makes me think of The Box of Delights and steam trains. Scrum-diddly-umptious. (Sorry. I don’t know what came over me there. Blame it on the brown wrapping paper.)

*After the stars fest, we are now looking for something else to do, craft-wise, which suits small fingers but gives big fingers something to do too. Recent hits have included wax rubbings of leaves and various baking bits. Any suggestions welcome.

To wit:
- housework;
- hunts for something-or-other I’ve misplaced;
- sorting out what the hell to do about my mother’s piano (currently being ‘rented’, where ‘rented’ = the rentee isn’t paying the money, and nor is she returning my calls, and I’m worried that when I do finally manage to contact her, she’ll tell me she doesn’t want the piano any more, which leaves me scrabbling around trying to re-home it, which is, frankly, a daunting prospect);
- the copy-editing I’ve got to do;
- the tax return I need to complete;
- the huuuuge list of crafty things which my brain tells me must be done if I am to attain the status of A Good One (mother, wife, general human being);
- the tiling I started weeks ago, which I’ve yet to finish because the next bit involves a tile cutter and I feel as if I need a longer stint at it than the small person’s snooze allows.

ARGH.

I just want to clear the decks, start again, have some energy, and I’m not really sure where to start, or why I’m feeling this so aggressively at the moment. The small girl is sleeping more consistently than she ever has, and generally life is good, if rather disorganised. We even came up with a solution to me ending up doing the grocery shopping every week (which gets a bit dull after a while); it involves Quercus going once every other week, and us getting a delivery of shopping in the off weeks. The irony? I haven’t sat down and done the ordering part, which means it’s not going to happen this week. It’s partly lack of time, but I’m aware that it’s also partly lack of enthusiasm – the time I do have free is very short, and largely in the evenings, when all I seem capable of is sitting, lump-like, on the sofa. I was going to say ‘all I want to do’ there, but the truth of it is that that’s really not the case; what I want to do is spring, gazelle-like, into action, a flurry of knitting, baking, creative, productive energy.

The small girl’s bedtime routine is fairly settled, but I am struggling to keep on top of it, to keep things on track, and she is going to bed probably a half-hour later than is ideal for her; we are not routine people in that this is a pattern which has been largely developed by her, and which we merely facilitate because it seems to suit her (and us, normally), but a half-hour is a big deal when you’re only twenty-six months old, and I feel shifty that her teatime often seems to be a scrabbling of frantic realisation that I have yet to start our dinner off, which means an even later meal than normal, and I just seem to be disorganised all the time. I want to sit down with her, and talk to her, perhaps while knitting, while she eats; I feel very strongly that it’s important that mealtimes are convivial, relaxed and communal. Don’t get me wrong: I am always in the room with her, and I do talk to her (and she to me, increasingly), but I am not able to give her my full attention because I’m normally surveying the three hundred things which still need doing, or which I’ve overlooked earlier in favour of a short stint online.

Our evening meal has slipped backwards so that we rarely sit down before eight o’clock, which, for me, means a very short evening afterwards, and a going to bed which feels hasty and anti-climax-like because I feel cheated of a Proper Evening, one in which Things Were Achieved. Also, increasingly, we’ve been sitting there, watching some load of rubbish on the Beeb’s iPlayer rather than eating at the table, and that normally means that we don’t clear up the kitchen after eating, and a daisy-cutter effect is thus encountered first thing in the morning, which doesn’t exactly set one up for the day, shall we say.

So, my plan is that today, when the small girl sleeps, rather than either sleeping myself (which, tempting though it is, doesn’t actually help my mood, really, and is so short as to be almost worse than not sleeping, sometimes), I will devise a cunning and rapid dinner for adult consumption, and I will have a tidy-up around the house as well as thinking of something creative to do with the small girl when she gets up (it’s very wet here today, so our default of going for a walk in the fields is probably not on the cards). Once that’s done, I will sit and cast on something knitting-wise; perhaps having started a project, it will seem easier to pick it up and get on with it in the evenings.

I am also declaring a fatwa on both Facebook (which in lots of ways I abhor) and shitty televisual programmes; after all, we got rid of our TV for just this reason, and both felt much happier in its absence. It’s so easy to waste your sodding life away while sitting there, watching some bloater cooking something you’re not remotely interested in, for someone you’ve never heard of, in a restaurant the prices of which you find morally offensive, or to read the profile of some friend-of-a-friend you’ve either never met or can’t actually recall either way while pondering their intense love of poodle crochet classes and upscale wheelbarrow decorating. In short, why am I doing this? This is not what life should be about. It’s not a lesson I want to teach the small girl, and it’s certainly not helping me or Quercus. It’s procrastination on a scale I’ve not encountered since my PhD days, when whole days passed with only a sense of increased desperation to show for them, and when I came to realise that if I don’t do things, I only feel worse for it. And if I’m not happy, our whole house suffers for it: the cooking gets crapper (with attendant guilt), the washing mounts up, the bedtimes get later, and poor Quercus gets that slightly hunted look which speaks of ‘she cannae take nae more, Cap’n – she’s goin’ee blow!’.

So, today, I will rip that sodding plaster off instead of picking nervously at the edges, and by god, I will take control of things, and get the fuck on with them. No pissing about online (and no, blogging, which has a tangible and cathartic result, does not count), and no sitting there feeling sorry for myself, and no despairing over The State Of This Fucking Place. Just progress, and creativity, and thus Ordnung.

And you? What are your frustrations in life at the moment, and how are you going about overcoming them (or procrastinating your way around them)?

Anyway.

Firstly, I’ve managed to whack my way through another ten or so new recipes in recent weeks, meaning I’ve got the smallest glimmer of a hope of completing 52 recipes in 2010. This weekend, we tried a lemon and lentil soup (v. g.), killer peanut butter fudge cookies (so good I am lusting after them now, at a distance of ten miles), and a mushroom and nut loaf which was really rather excellent. All keepers, definitely.

Secondly, our workshop now has a roof. Well, it has a protective layer of stuff fastened down with battening; the stuff can be a roof in its own right for three months, but within that time it will gain its fircone-like shingling, meaning it just becomes a part of the belt-and-braces approach to weatherproofing which Quercus has opted for with this project. The waney-edged boards arrive soon, so the walls will be clad, and before we know it, we’ll be reclaiming our stuff from a neighbour’s garage and there’ll be one less element of chaos to cope with. (At the moment, Quercus’s car forms a mobile shed – the boot is full of circular saws, chainsaws and brushcutters. As you do.)

Thirdly, Quercus’s mother departs the province today, after a stay of ten days. It’s been OK-ish – we had several near-misses in terms of open warfare when she wouldn’t leave something alone (to wit: ambitions for life, jobs, babies, childcare, living without money, What The Neighbours Think Of Us and The Situation With My Father), but it could have been worse, and by my standard measure of success (no-one died) we passed with flying colours. That said, the sheer quantity of time we’ve spent with her this year has made me think a bit. We’ve all found it really difficult having her about for so long – probably eight weeks this year – in part because we are ungrateful fuckpigs, but mostly because she is genuinely the most difficult person to get on with that I have ever met, which, coupled with extremely irritating personal habits (‘Morning Has Broken’, out of tune, ad nauseum, at six-thirty in the morning would be hard to take for anyone, I think, as would the continual use of ‘spend a penny’ when you go near a bathroom – woman, you are GOING FOR A WEE, like anyone normal), bring us close to the brink every time we’re together, and, what’s more, our normal tolerance levels haven’t really recovered from her first visit, back in March, letalone the recent and prolonged blows-upon-a-bruise visitations.

We have fallen into the habit of asking her to visit at Christmas, preferring to take our medecine at the start of the time off we get rather than for the New Year. We have yet to actually articulate this invitation this year, and she will shortly be off to Canada for about three weeks, meaning we’re going to have a longer break than we’ve so far enjoyed from each others’ company (because I’m sure we piss her off as much as she does us), so I wondered if we ought to get it in before she goes. But then… At the moment, the idea of her coming here at Christmas fills me with dread.

The thing is, while I can tolerate her, and manage her, and, with the odd flash of white rage, bite back the things I’d like to say (while restraining my arm from its murderous fumbling for the nearest heavy object) and so on, Quercus finds it much, much harder. She makes him so cross that he sometimes physically removes himself and goes for a very irritable walk, just to wear off the anger. He rants, nightly, about the many ways in which she is impossible. Worse than that, his relationship with her makes him feel immensely guilty: that he doesn’t get on with her better, than he isn’t more forthcoming when she’s around, that he can’t be himself with her, that he knows that NOT being himself probably makes it worse, that he can’t bring himself to be the person to whom he thinks she would react better, that he longs for her departure as soon as she arrives, that she tries very hard to help us, both physically and financially, that she can be very thoughtful yet still he feels as he does.

I feel a few of these guilts myself – she does a lot to help us, and she’s the only member of our joint families who does (though lordy me, when someone reminds you of this and actively asks you for thanks or praise, it doesn’t help, does it?). But the thing I feel mostly is that I worry that every time she comes to see us for a significant event, that significant event gets rained on slightly. The small girl’s second birthday was a good case in point – she was vile about something-or-other, and we had a very tense few hours while she got over whatever it was that had caused the vileness. Last Christmas she was so rude the very first evening she arrived that Quercus determined to ask her to leave if she hadn’t cheered the fuck up by the following morning. Does it always have to be like this? Apparently so. I’ve taken to challenging her head-on about the things she does, sometimes, i.e. ‘we seem to be at loggerheads here; have I said something to upset you?’ Sometimes this works, sometimes it causes only teenage flouncing.

It’s been better, though not unfailingly so, since the small girl arrived. Prior to her appearance, most visits included at least two threats to go home, while we are now down to a batting average of one or so, with only moderate use of guilt thrown in. So far, she has only taken her irritation with us out on the small girl once or twice, and she has only done something which we felt was openly not a good idea once, when she was trailing a small child, howling, up and down the lane to the car, to pack her things, rather than waiting ten minutes so that one of us could take over and she could just get on. The small girl didn’t understand what she’d done to warrant being pulled about, chided and ignored in equal parts; the simple answer was that we had asked her grandma to look after her when her grandma hadn’t wanted to, and it would have been rather easier if said grandma had just said no – the resulting child meltdown took far longer to sort out than we’d gained in child-free time.

It’s a difficult thing, letting the dynamic between the small girl and her grandma evolve without stepping in too often. I don’t want the small girl to pick up the habits of her grandma’s which drive us to distraction, and nor do I want her to see how annoying we find the woman. I had no relationship with my grandparents – two dead, two uninterested – and I do want my daughter to have a better sense of where she comes from, of her wider family, than I had; two people did not form a big enough support network when my mother died, and I have never felt more keenly the lack of siblings near my own age, or grandparents, or uncles and aunts, than I did at that time. But are irritating people better than no people at all? Sometimes, I am not sure. It’s a sort of ‘if you can’t be with the one you love…’ scenario, really. And the small girl does love her grandma, despite her quixotic nature. I suppose I just hope that she comes to see how irritating she can be (thus maintaining our sanity!) but loves her nonetheless, with the distance of a generation, with more ease than we have managed.

And in the meantime, here I am, busily contemplating pregnancy and babies and how that would alter our family as it stands, and what role Quercus’s mother would have in that shift. It’s a bit sticky, frankly. I still long for the huge family dinners, with ten people crammed around a ridiculously small table, or Sunday mornings with fourteen children of varying ages destroying the counters while assembling a very sugary breakfast, or midweek evenings with the stove lit and lots of people watching something entertaining on DVD, or winter walks with several dogs, a few antiquated relatives trailing sticks about the place and a riot of children poking streams, chasing cats and generally being beastly. Fun. Friendship. Respect. Laughter.

I don’t know that there is an answer to The Problem of Families, and Relatives In General, is there? Except one involving wood alcohol, anyway.

Anyway. On to less sticky things. Or not, as the case may be.

Lemon and Lentil Soup
Get hold of…
3 potatoes, diced
2 carrots, chopped
2 chopped onions
A goodly wodge of garlic, chopped
A slug of olive oil
A generous handful of herbs (parsley, sage, oregano, basil – whatever comes to hand)
A large mug of lentils
About a pint and a half of water
A stockcube
3 mugs of spinach/chard/sorrel/greens of some sort you can’t quite identify, which probably won’t kill you
The juice of two lemons, squished rather inefficiently with your hands
A spot of salt and pepper

Then…
Into the pan with the onions, garlic, carrots and taters, and fry them in the oil for a bit, until they start to capitulate. Whop in the lentils, water, herbs and stockcube, stick on a lid and boil it all up until the potatoes soften, at which point, in go spinach and lemon juice for another ten minutes or so. Make sure it’s all cooked through; take off the heat; blend to avoid wierdly stringy bits of spinach in soup context, which would be Just Wrong.

Cookies and nut loaf to follow.

So. After that depressing little wander through the familial labyrinth, tell me nice happy things (including the recipe for healing such maternal discord) this instant, gentle reader, in the box of commentage below.

Yesterday we* clambered about on it, putting up the first two roof trusses, and slotting the beam which forms the apex into place. Ridge pole, I believe. It was interesting; there were Very Big Nails involved, and a lot of up-and-down, but very little swearing or getting cross; Quercus and I work pretty well together, and fortunately I don’t seem to drive him quite as demented as his mother does, which is reassuring. I’ve got pictures of various stages of it thus far; the floor supports are in place, and the walls’ studwork, and now two of the zillions of roof trusses are up – the overall impression is of an ark, frankly.

The bark is still on part of the wood because it came free from a local sawmill, so hadn’t been processed because they wanted to get rid of it. We’re going to treat it to help it remain solid against the wet Devon weather, but the wood chaps estimate it should last for twenty years or more even untreated.

That green amorphous blob is the table saw, hiding under a dumpy bag because the weather, despite the blue skies here, has been so unpredictable for the last month or so that you just never know when it’s going to tip it down suddenly… Gives an idea of scale, too – the apex is about eleven feet up.

See what I mean about the ark-like quality? It’s even more this way now that all the roof trusses are in place; more pictures to follow now that I am once more be-camerad.

In other news, pumpkins. Well, specifically, Hooligans. Quercus’s mother has grown a packet of these, and brought down a large bag of the upshot, which is to say, about ten little pumpkins of a most aesthetically pleasing nature. I chopped the lids off, whipped out the seeds and that odd stringy bit in which pumpkins seem to specialise, and in went a rather pleasant combination of cheese, lentils, beans and brown rice.

I’m hoping they keep well; we have another five or so to go, and next time I’m wondering about a nut, mushroom and brown rice thing for the stuffing business…

Stuffed pumpkins
Ingredients
Some pumpkins (!)
An onion or two
A large lump of cheese
About a mugful of lentils
About a mugful of beans, barley, split peas – whatever comes to hand, pulses-wise, really
Quite a lot of garlic
About a mugful of brown rice
Some herbs – I used basil, sage, parsley, thyme and oregano
A slosh of Tabasco
A stockcube
A couple of eggs

Then…
Boil up everything bar the pumpkins, the eggs and the cheese in a large pan, using enough water to mean the end result is a sticky-ish stodge, rather than something needing draining – you want to eat all those herby bits and bats, rather than watching them disappear down the plughole. When you’re sure the pulses aren’t going to poison anyone, remove said pan from the heat and grate in the cheese. When the resulting even-more-sticky mass has cooled a bit, mix in the eggs.

Carve off lids for the pumpkins and take out the seedy bit. I stabbed the sides a few times because, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and dobbed a little bit of butter on the edges here and there before filling the cavity with the cheesy lentil mixture and putting the lid back on. (Because I am greedy of a generous disposition, the lids were more sort of squodged on top than actually replaced, but this, I found, led to an agreeably crunchy collar of cheesy loveliness around the edge of the lid when cooked.) Pop the filled pumpkins on a tray, with a tablespoon or two of water to help the skins cook, and a few little dots of butter on their lids. Cook them at about 180°c for about an hour; they went very nicely with some opportunist baked taters, and some steamed courgettes. Having only encountered pumpkin in either a soup or a pie context prior to this, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it tasted quite strongly, and that its texture was rather like potato; I’d thought the filling would serve largely to disguise something a tad on the unspeakable side.

After this, a nice sit-down and a cup of tea is called for, as is a large slice of tiffin, which became my poor-man’s-Rocky Road yesterday when I realised that I simply wasn’t going to find proper marshmallows, as opposed to the ghastly Flump-style aberrations. So, I took this route:

Tiffin
Wossinit?
100g dark chocolate
2 tbsp honey
100g butter
A large pinch of cinnamon
A drop of Angostura bitters
About half a mug of sultanas
About half a mug of roasted walnuts
100g ginger biscuits, with a few digestives thrown in because I could

So…
Melt the chocolate, honey and butter together; I tend to ignore that whole ‘gently’ malarky and just blast the bastard in the microwave because I have no patience, and so far it’s worked just fine. When you’ve got a gorgeous silky mix of chocolate with which you’d quite like to just retire quietly to the shadows, spoon in hand, resist this temptation, and take out the resulting frustration on those biscuits, damn them. Pop them in a small bag and bash the blighters until they are fine crumbs. (Take that, you… you… biscuit!) Add in the nuts (I think pine nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or really anything crunchy would work equally well) and the sultanas (which, likewise, you could replace with any sort of dried fruit you fancied, I should imagine), and then pour on the melted chocolate mixture. Mix it all in thoroughly, then turn it out into a 20cm square tin you’ve lined with something like foil or baking paper (which makes for a rather easier turning-out manoeuvre later on) and stick it in the fridge to set. When you want to cut it into pieces (assuming you get that far), whip it out and let it warm up a tad so it doesn’t crack when you cut it, and bingo: chocolatey stickiness of a rather pleasant, deeply un-labour-intensive nature.

So, pictures of woody bits to follow, and also of pumpkins, in theory, at least. Anyone got any other pumpkin recipes worth sharing? I’d love to see my pumpkin prejudices trounced once and for all.

* For once, not the Royal We which means Quercus, but both of us; positioning timber which is that heavy is simply not possible single-handed unless you have better access to your site, and probably quite a few lengths of rope for levering things.

The morning we spent getting lost finding our way to Pencarrow, a large stately house between Bodmin and Camelford, while the rain attempted to move from spitting to tipping. We realised about an hour’s drive from home that we’d come out armed to the teeth with a full change of clothes for the small girl, food, drinks, a flask, a nappy-changing bag and even a spare pair of shoes and jeans for me, but we’d completely forgotten coats for ourselves; fortunately, Camelford smiled on us, and a charity shop provided a fleece for Quercus while a hardware shop had a surprising range of lightweight rainproof jackets. We managed a picnic – despite having forgotten mayonnaise or butter for our otherwise bare bread – under overcast skies and walnut trees laden with green bombs, and the Pencarrow peacocks are as lovely as I remember them being when I went there as a child.

From Pencarrow we went to Boscastle, for a walk on the cliffs, around the valley, and through the village itself, for most of which the small girl slept in the sling on my back, waking just in time for tea and scones at a riverside eatery. Her initiation into the greatest of British traditions, fish and chips, took place later in the evening, at long past small-person bedtime o’clock; one of my enduring memories of this time will be of us sitting on the giant breakwater on the beach at Westward Ho (!), passing chips and morsels of fish to a small girl wrapped tightly in her father’s fleece, while she grinned at the wind in her hair and commented on seagulls approaching.

It’s astonishing the difference that one day off can make. We’ve all felt a bit like new people since Saturday, and we’ve all been much happier for it. There’s always something we should be doing, or somewhere we should be tidying, or something that could do with a wash/change/paint/sand/drill, and it’s not that everyday life hasn’t got lots of carrotty lovelinesses of its own, of course, but rather that sometimes, in order to appreciate them, it helps to be able to view them from a distance, I find; the carrots of proper daytrips are thus many and varied, in that you have a good day out, which is a carrot in its own right, but then you have the side-effect carrot of recognising your daily life carrots too. Gosh. What a lot of carrots.

We have determined to make these days off, these steppings-out from our daily lives, a more frequent happening, if only to give us time and space to remember how good our life together is, and how lucky we are to live as we do, in a place we love (even if it does drive us demented sometimes), with people who make us happy (and, er, demented).

So, talking of carrots, which we weren’t, really… I’ve been at the 52 Recipes malarky again, with the following:

Saffron-braised carrots with broad bean pilaf

Ingredients
For the carrots:
About eight large carrots, chopped as you fancy
A large pinch of saffron
A mug of veggie stock
A large onion, peeled and chopped
A generous sprinkling of cumin, coriander, parsley and thyme
A rather more timid sprinkling of Tabasco
Giant wodges of chopped garlic, so indecent in quantity as to make numbers futile
A slug of olive/sunflower oil

Then…
Basically, sling the lot in a pan, bring to the boil, and simmer for about twenty minutes or so, lid on in an attempt not to curry the entire house. (Or, you know, curry away: I myself quite like the smell of tandoori pillows at bedtime.) (I think some chard or spinach would add to this rather well, and possibly some potatoes too.  Otherwise it is rather… carrotty.)

For the pilaf:
A mug of broad beans
A large mug of brown rice
2 red onions, chopped
A handful of sultanas
A handful of pinenuts
A handful of chopped unsulphured apricots
A sprinkling of cumin

Then…
Boil the broad beans briskly for about five to ten minutes, drain, and park somewhere.  Sling rice, onions and cumin in a pan and add boiling water to cover the rice; bring back to the boil on the hob, put a lid on and switch off the power, and the residual heat should do the rest. Sling the rest of the ingredients – including the beans, because who would forget the beans? The beans which are part of the title? Not me – oh no – in for the last ten minutes or so before you eat, and there you go. The carrotty bit over the top of the rice goes really well, though Quercus tells me it’s lacking something. By which he means SAUSAGES.

(I’m spending a week cooking dinner from Cranks Fast Food by Nadine Abensur, because I’ve had the book for about eight years, and have only done the stuffed courgette recipe so far, because I find the writing style so off-putting, and, frankly, so deeply pretentious as to be quite toe-curling. Then there’s the fact taht every recipe in it seems to revolve around cumin, tabasco, tamari and something else that a delicatessen in Kensington might be able to order for you, but which your average supermarket probably hasn’t heard of. So, I thought I’d give it a bit of a blitz, to see if it’s worthy of its shelf room. So far, I like the recipes well enough, though I find myself changing ingredients here and there, and ignoring half of the method; the jury’s still out on its long-term residence here, though.

On the menu this week: stuffed courgettes; green beans, tomatoes and garlic; Boston baked beans; herby gnocchi (with a radically different sauce from the recipe one); something to do with pasta and, probably tabasco and cumin. Wish me luck… )

(Image courtesy of The Salty Spoon, because I have that very casserole dish, and because my camera, now six, is in the process of dying a slow and painful death; anyone got any recommendations for cameras which don’t break the bank?)

Oh. Hang on. Just a minute.

Right you are.

So. There was a weekend; it just doesn’t feel as if there was. That would be because we all got up at something starting with a six on both Saturday and Sunday, and because Quercus has been pulling twelve-hour days working on landscaping the garden, aided by his – apparently indefatigable – mother, and because having people who are Not Us staying with us for ten days takes a toll, even if they are the loveliest souls you could imagine, and because teething is just plain horrid, and because sticky hot weather which is obviously in need of a damn good thunder storm is, well, sticky and hot.

Yes.

The division of labour referred to in the title has been giving me pause for thought recently. When Quercus and I bought our first house (well, OK, technically he bought it, and I did a PhD), we divided the work on it pretty equally. We both had a go at plastering, and at stripping walls, and at painting, and putting up shelves, and building desks, and replacing woodwork, and sorting out gardens, and marvelling at the utter tripe that passes for decorating in some houses. We both got covered in dust, and lost bits of fingernail while opening tins or ferreting about under floorboards. We both replaced sections of walls while remarking the bouncy nature of surrounding structures didn’t bode well, and we both organised quotes for things that required Teeth* larger than those we possessed at the time. (Those Teeth have now been taken out, and replaced with a giant set of chomping nashers which are unafraid of, well, virtually anything, in house terms, given that we’ve lived with acros propping up the external walls of the house, with no running water, with walls turning to dust or mud depending on the nature of the neglect they’d suffered.)

But since we’ve had the small girl, that division has changed. Firstly, while I was pregnant, we were cooking up not just a small girl, but also the plans for the extension with which we would replace the single-skin-brick ‘kitchen’ and ‘bathroom’ (I use these terms very loosely in this context…) which were here when we moved to the Earthenhouse. I was also finishing my PhD, and I can honestly say that, having thought all those claims regarding ‘pregnancy brain’ were just ridiculous females making excuses for their general state of dizziness, I WAS WRONG – I have never felt fuzzier in my life than I did when pregnant, and there came a point where it was all I could do to waddle through the work I need to get done on my thesis. The very thought of discussing extensions, planning applications and whatnot brought on palpitations, or, more often, a comatose state.

The old extension. Note buggered roof and frost on inside.

Because nothing says rural living like mouldy walls and fabric-like ceilings, right?

Why yes, since you ask: a tarp is absolutely an acceptable wall material.

Beginning to move into the new extension.

Note fairy lights, for where there are little lights, all is right with the world.

Men’s and Wimmin’s Work collides: bench saw and fermentation.

Just before this push on the garden.

Of course, we did talk about these things, because they were important, and needed decisions and whatnot, but I suppose that’s when the shift started.

And now, it’s largely Quercus who bears the brunt of the vast scale of the work our house needs to make it truly the home we want. (For now.) I have helped with things like lime rendering, and with dumper truck-driving, and with limewashing, and bathroom tiling, and various odds and sods like painting and sanding, but mostly, it’s been Quercus who’s out there slogging at it for horrible lengths of time, and it’s Quercus whose hands hurt from overuse of an SDS drill, or of a mixer, or of a breaker of some sort, and it’s Quercus who dropped the mixer on his leg yesterday because he’d been working too hard for too long, and I feel incredibly shifty.

Well, that’s the short version.

I spent the weekend with the small girl, doing things like sorting out the laundry, or making food, or attempting to cheer said girl up in the face of (we assume) molar machinations which rendered her mood less than upbeat. We made some felt balls on Saturday, and a sort of Anglo-Saxon felted crown on Sunday (all thanks to the very lovely Claire at Whispering Acres, who sent us a gorgeous assortment of goodies, including Kool-Aid, roving of all colours and textures, and even a book, about a month ago, and which we’re only just getting to grips with now). We made some bread (the quick recipe involving no kneading remains a favourite – seriously, ten minutes of actual input – all told – and just some time for it to rise and cook, and you’re done). We tried out a vegan version of Macaroni Cheese (which was lovely, and will definitely be added to the repertoire). We provided ice lollies when the heat was too much for the physical work needed on levelling the garden (which, at about four feet higher than the lane it abuts, was in dire need of some shoring-up if we were to avoid a not-that-small-given-the-size-of-the-lane mud-slide, and let’s not even get started on how much earth has been moved about the place in recent weeks).

The rational part of me knows that all these things need to happen, and that it makes sense that I am the person who makes them happen, because, well, first, Quercus is stronger than me, and fitter than me, and second, his mum actually chooses to do these things rather than looking after the small girl; I think that, while she loves her very clearly, she does find it tiring looking after her for five mornings a week, which is what she has been doing while we’re in this push of work on the house. So, when it gets to the weekend, she is quite glad to hand her back to me, and just help Quercus with things which most grandparents wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole – last night, for example, they were mixing up concrete at half-past eight, while I finished cooking dinner and sorting out the chaotic kitchen). At least some of my shiftiness is prompted by the sight of a sixty-something woman digging giant heaps of rubble out. It makes me feel like the very laziest of women to be floating about the place with the small girl, while everyone else seems to be doing Proper Work. It’s stupid, really, because, again, the rational part of me recognises and affirms the fact that looking after small people is a tremendous job, with huge responsibility and the potential to create either vast spaces of joy and fulfilledness or overwhelming depths of misery and discord, yet still there is this not-so-little voice telling me that I’m a shirker.

It doesn’t help, of course, that poor Quercus was up this morning at five, and was working with the digger by a quarter-past. Nor does it help that his hands are very achey at the moment, and he’s quite battered with various things which he’s hit or whacked or scratched or burnt in the couple of years, while I sit here proffering lotions and potions which only serve to make me more aware of the stark divide in our general daily tasks. I suppose it comes back to the familiar story: things traditionally viewed as Wimmin’s Work are not, by and large, valued as Work which will bear close comparison with Men’s Work. I am woman: hear me iron. Er…

I find that split deeply toe-curling, though. Quercus and I have always tended towards a reasonably ‘traditional’ (for want of a less loaded term) division, large-scale house renovation aside, in that I have always loved cooking, baking and generally attempting to create a feeling of home, while he genuinely enjoys such delights as chopping wood and digging potatoes. And I very much dislike the idea of a feminism which views these traditionally gendered activies – baking, making – as unworthy of card-holding feminists; rather, I embrace the recent trend in trying to change the way such activities are viewed, to reincorporate them into the overall picture of What It Is To Be Human, Never Mind Female, to show that such work is just as important as any other. I’m just having a hard time remembering to believe what I claim to know. Ya boo sucks to Traditional Gender Identities. Or something.

*Anyone who reads Blue Witch may be familiar with her Big Teeth; let’s hope that familiarity remains at a ‘by reputation only’ level – !

This weekend, we have hired a three-tonne mini-digger and a dumper truck. With these, we are doing some fairly major work on our garden. This week, Quercus has taken down three corrugated iron sheds which dominated one side of the garden, breaking up the concrete bases as he went, as well as moving about three hundred bricks which we’re going to reuse from the old extension, and rediscovering the slabs which used to make up the old patio (and which we’re reusing this time around, but with a smaller patio so that we can also have paths made of decent slabs). So much stuff has gone to the metals merchant, too – an old bath, the old sheds, various bits of leftover pipe and even some bits we found kicking about in the earth.

The garden, while still chaotic, is at least clear of the various things which have just been sort of stored there for the last couple of years, which is nice, and we are just about to spend a couple of days shoving earth about the place to level out some of strangeness in the garden, as well as preparing for the wooden shed which Quercus will build to house all the tools and whatnot which we’ve acquired in the last few years. This shed will be smaller and prettier, and built, nearly exclusively, from reclaimed timber, a lot of which we salvaged from a house development in Exeter. It’s deeply smug-making to get things which people are throwing away and give them new life, to say nothing of the financial bonus of not having to shell out several hundred pounds on timber.

And you? Any plans for the weekend?